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Tomato Catsup
1 quart tomatoes. 1 tablespoon salt. 1 tablespoon pepper. 1 tablespoon allspice. 1 tablespoon cloves. 1 tablespoon mustard. 1 quart vinegar. Let simmer two or three hours; seal in bottles or jars.
A bare-bones catsup formula of the sort printed by the hundred in early twentieth-century books, where the writer assumed the reader had made catsup before. The proportions here are unusually vinegar-heavy and unusually heavy on spice, which changes how you should handle both.
- Treat it as a refrigerator condiment"Seal in bottles or jars" is open-kettle canning: hot product into a jar, lid on, no processing. That practice was abandoned decades ago because the seal is unreliable and the jar rim is never sterilised. Bottle this, cool it, and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for a month or more; if you want shelf-stable catsup, use a current tested recipe with a specified water-bath time.
- A quart of tomatoes is ambiguousThe original does not say whether that is whole tomatoes, chopped pulp, or strained juice. Read it as roughly 2 lb of ripe tomatoes, cut up, which makes about a quart of loose pulp. With a quart of vinegar added, the finished volume after two to three hours will vary; a pint or so is a reasonable expectation, but watch the pan rather than the clock.
- The spice measures assume whole spicesThe spice measures probably assume whole spices -- A tablespoon each of allspice and cloves, if ground, would be overwhelming and gritty. Whole allspice berries and whole cloves tied in cheesecloth and pulled at the end are the safer reading; put the tablespoon of mustard in as seed, or as dry mustard stirred through in the last twenty minutes.
- Cut the salt back and tasteA tablespoon of salt to a pint of finished catsup is very salty by modern palates. Add half, then correct at the end when the volume has settled.
- Vinegar strengthPeriod recipes often meant sharp cider vinegar. Modern distilled or cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is what you want here; the equal volume of vinegar to tomato makes this a thin, tart, pourable sauce closer to a Worcestershire than to the thick sweet catsup on a supermarket shelf. There is no sugar in it at all.
- The simmer is the whole techniqueTwo to three hours uncovered over low heat is what drives off water and marries the spice. Use a wide non-reactive pan, stir the bottom often once it thickens, and strain through a sieve before bottling if you want it smooth.
Catsup began life as a spiced, strained, keeping sauce rather than a tomato product at all — the word is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, and English cooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made catsup from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters and anchovies long before tomatoes became the default. What survived from those older sauces is exactly what you see here: vinegar as the preservative, a heavy hand with allspice, cloves and mustard, and a long reduction to concentrate everything. The recipe belongs to a period when American home canning was promoted as a patriotic household duty and short preserving formulas circulated widely for readers working through a garden glut. The telegraphic style of this recipe — no yield, no jar size, no processing time — reflects that context, and also the reason such recipes need rethinking now: the safety instructions were carried in the reader's head, not on the page.